Cultural Challenges: Buying a Train Ticket

Our posts are becoming a little more sporadice... I must say that is not a matter of having enough material to post, but more a matter of finding the time to sit down to do it, not to mention select exactly what to write about; there is plenty of material. Anyway, as many of you know, one sacrifice that we've had to make with our move to China is my commuting to the not-so-nearby town of Wuxi which is a 2-3 hour door-to-door commute for me twice a week. This is taxi ride to the train station, high-speed train ride at over 150 mph followed by another taxi.

[Note, in and around Shanghai, distances are best expressed in time and by mode of transportation... 10 km = 1 hour by car in traffic = 20 minutes by reasonable taxi without traffic = 10 minutes white-knuckled ride in taxi in traffic as well as some short distances up on the sidewalk...Veronica, our more thrill-seeking child seems to always want to ride in a taxi]

Anyway, if you have read up on our previous posts, we recently started our first Chinese New Year experience. I say "start", because even though it officially ended yesterday with the Lantern Festival, Fireworks are still going off even after the holiday has officially ended. This marks the 5-6th straight week of fireworks in Shanghai; a little less in Wuxi.

During the holiday, the family thought it would be nice to get out of Shanghai for a change of scenery. A colleague invited me to visit Wuxi for dinner and some sightseeing. Sounds great, but one problem... How do I actually buy a train ticket?

The foreigner SOS hotline is a service to help foreigners (us, that is) find things around town, tell a taxi driver where we need to go, etc. A very helpful service I must say. Anyway, they helped me locate the nearest train ticket office, so I promptly got in a cab and off I went.

So, doing my initial surveillance of the place, I walk in and locate the schedule...all in Chinese character, except for the time (in 24 hour format) and the train number. "D" trains are good and high-speed (reserved seating only). All others, not so good...slower, many stops, and standing tickets are avaialble (very crowded). For a first excursion in China, I wanted to avoid anything that involved the family crowded into a train, standing for a 2+ hour train ride. A long train ride increased the likelihood that the children would need a potty break on the train, and well Eastern-style toilets (hole in the floor) also presented another potential pitfal (no pun intended).

I figured out the train schedule because fortunately I had a previous ticket stub (I would have been done for from the beginning had I not had this on hand), so I could find the characters for Wuxi. This allowed me to find the trains that had stops in Wuxi.

Now, I'm ready... the place has emptied out, so I won't feel pressured by a crush of people behind me when I know we'll struggle through this. I approach the booth, and ask for four first class round-trip ticket from Shanghai to Wuxi at 17:05 on the same day, or the next. Here is where language lessons tend to be a challenge...you first learn to say and hear specific questions. Unfortunately, lady in the ticket booth did not know the correct responses from the Berlitz Virtual Classroom text and subsequently used different responses. Because whatever she answered, it did not sound remotely like anything familiar.

So, I looked at her in my I-have-no-idea-what-you-are-saying look, shrugged my shoulders and repeated, using every possible hand gesture and body language, plus holding a calendar and pointing to the dates and train schedule, I tried again... She types on the computer and turns it around showing me what looks like the same type of train, but at a different time. I responded "shi" which essentially means "yes" and show four fingers indicating four tickets. She goes on again...nothing from the Berlitz script, so I don't understand her.

As we're having a lovely conversation using words that mean nothing to each other, I get the realization that I'm not going to walk out of here with any tickets regardless of how long I try. So, even though she's showing me a screen with what seems like an acceptable ticket to me...

...she's pointing at the screen showing the train number and time,

...indicating four tickets saying "su yao jin tian" (meaing "four for today"), shaking her head up and down,

...I'm shaking my head up and down,

...and I'm trying to hand her money for the ticket,

...it doesn't seem like she wants to sell them to me

(I am thinking, "this is your job, why won't you sell them to me?"),

She seems to keep wanting to confirm that I accept whatever it is that she said. I keep nodding my head up and down feeling like a bobble-head, and she keeps repeating herself and pointing to the screen (once again, the only thing I can read are the train numbers, the time and the date...everything else is in Chinese script) and I'm not getting much of what she's saying besides the words for four, today, and train.

For those of you that have been to India, I compare this to when you ask a yes or no question, and you get the "head bobbing" response...does this mean yes or no? I need to find out if head shaking up and down means yes and side-to-side means no in China, because she didn't really use either, and I was relying on head motions to help reinforce my yes/no (or shi/bu) responses.

Next enters a nice young Chinese gentlemen who elbows his way up to the counter. He looks at me and says something to the lady behind the bars, and he then explains to me that there are no seats. "Ah-hah!" I respond and ask him "are there any tickets available to get to Wuxi by train for four people?" and he repeated that there were no seats. "Oh...", now I'm confused again.

So, I asked him why she keeps pointing to the screen, and he explains to me that there are no seats...just standing tickets. "Ah-hah." [again, hesitating thinking there is more, but there isn't] Now, we're getting somewhere. Now, I know the best option is to give up, thank them for the time, and walk out...which I did.

So, a lesson for any visitors to China, if it's around Chinese New Year, most of the normal rules are "out of the window" given the overload on the train and other transportation systems (see my previous post on the travel situation on Chinese New Year).

During Chinese New Year, D-trains also have standing tickets...

Moral to the story, "avoid train travel in China during the New Year holiday if at all possible". [and it is safe to assume that you want to avoid busses as well...I'll go on faith that is sound advice]